On the ‘passions’ and reason

In a great book,“” , the author, Donald Robertson, writes on the wisdom of Stoic thinking.

“What does Stoic philosophy demand from us? What promise does it hold out in return? What are the causes of the irrational desires and emotional disturbances for which people seek a remedy in philosophy? What about positive feelings like joy, tranquility and love?

Seneca

Before getting further into theory and practice, it’s traditional explore what motivates people to become students of Stoic philosophy in the first place. Stoicism is a hard road to follow but we’re told its benefits should, in a manner of speaking, be common sense – with a bit of help, we should be able at least glimpse them from the outset. Although only the perfect enjoys , Seneca claims that unless we embrace philosophy, the love of wisdom, life is not even bearable, because emotional disturbances are allowed free rein. Indeed, the initial motive for most people to study Stoic philosophy simply the alleviation of their own suffering, although the ultimate goal is to excel as a human .

So the promise of philosophy consists of both the supreme Happiness and fulfilment (eudaimonia) of the Sage and the aspiring Stoic’s gradual progress towards overcoming

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 1 On the ‘passions’ and reason disturbing desires and emotions (apatheia), sometimes called the Stoic ‘therapy of the passions’. As far as the ancient Stoics were concerned: ‘The philosopher’s school is a doctor’s clinic’ (Discourses, 3.23).

Musonius Rufus

Curiously, the Stoics appear to attribute the exhortation to philosophy to himself, who promises us relief from suffering. Musonius Rufus taught that Zeus ‘orders and encourages’ us to study philosophy. According to him, in a nutshell, the law of Zeus orders humans to be good, which means being philosophers, loving wisdom, being virtuous and magnanimous, rising above pain and pleasure, and being free from animosity towards others.

Epictetus follows his teacher, and frequently places similar words in the mouth of Zeus, starting with the first of his compiled lectures. He actually breaks away from his conversation with students to describe an imaginary dialogue between himself and Zeus, who is portrayed as saying he has given us a small portion of himself, our ‘ruling faculty’, which gives us the power to make choices and decisions in life. It is our duty to take care of this divine faculty above all else, as it is our only true possession, and we are granted complete freedom in employing it. If we can learn to prize wisdom above all other things, ‘Zeus’ assures us we will never be obstructed, never become upset or complain, and never become angry with or subservient to any other person.

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Zeus

The point was making is that the basic principles of Stoicism are learnable from reflection on human nature. They are fundamentally common sense, as Zeus has planted the seed of deep within all of us and so the goal of life is in our very nature. Elsewhere, he asks his students whether Zeus or Nature has not already given them their orders, clearly enough, from the day they were born. Nature has given us what is ours, our judgement and volition, to use freely, in accord with virtue. She has placed everything else beyond our direct control, subject to obstacles and interference. ‘Guard by every means that which your own, but do not grasp at that which is another’s.’

Although the words vary, most of the time Epictetus portrays Zeus as thundering the same basic Stoic message: ‘If you wish any good thing, get it from yourself’ (Discourses, 1.29). Nature itself teaches us that if we want true Happiness, and the good life, we must seek it within ourselves rather than in external things. If we can only do this consistently, Epictetus says, we will achieve perfect freedom, and liberate ourselves from emotional suffering.

Happiness or fulfilment, eudaimonia, was known in ancient times as ‘the promise of

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 3 On the ‘passions’ and reason philosophy’. All schools of philosophy basically agreed that this was what they were aiming for, but they disagreed about precisely what it meant. In fact, their different definitions of eudaimonia distinguished one school from another. Zeno described it very concisely as a ‘smoothly flowing’ or serene life, a life of freedom from being thwarted or obstructed in what we seek to achieve. He made it clear that this is achieved by living in harmonious agreement with Nature, and in accord with virtue. However, ‘life is warfare’, and the Stoic achieves serenity by arming himself to face whatever may be inflicted on him by the vicissitudes of events, the turning ‘Wheel of Fortune’. The promise of philosophy was therefore the promise of both Happiness and the emotional resilience to retain it in the face of setbacks.

Cicero

For what does the promise amount to? This that, heaven willing, philosophy will ensure that the man who has obeyed its laws shall never fail to be armed against all the hazards of fortune: that he shall possess and control, within his own self, every possible guarantee for a satisfactory and Happy life. In other words, that he shall always be a happy man. (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.7)

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Elsewhere Cicero portrays Happiness in terms of the ‘inner citadel’ of Stoicism: ‘We want the happy man to be safe, impregnable, fenced and fortified, so that he is not just largely unafraid, but completely’ (Tusculan Disputations, 5.41). One of the most important philosophical arguments of the Stoics was that it is impossible to imagine someone who is on the one hand a wise and good man, having attained perfect eudaimonia, and, on the other hand, still plagued by emotional disturbance or pathological desires. The Stoics famously refer to these as the ‘passions’ (pathe); they believed them to be the root cause of all human suffering, and essentially toxic to eudaimonia.

The ability to overcome unhealthy fears and desires is termed apatheia, being ‘passionless’ or rather without passions of the problematic sort. It’s where our word ‘apathy’ comes from, but that’s not what it means. As Keith Seddon, a modern Stoic author, puts it, ‘The Stoic will be apathes, without passion (not apathetic, but dispassionate), but not wholly without feeling’. The Stoics also refer to the Sage as having attained ‘tranquillity’ () and ‘freedom’ (eleutheria) from ‘enslavement’ by the passions.

However, these endeavours to overcome the ‘passions’ have caused much confusion and led to the widespread misconception that the Stoics are somehow ‘unemotional’ or seek to repress their feelings. This is largely based on a misunderstanding caused by problems of modern translation and interpretation – it’s simply not what they meant. This misinterpretation was repeatedly addressed by the ancient Stoics themselves, though. So let’s pause to reflect on what they actually said…

They [the founders of Stoicism] say the wise man is also passionless [apathe, whence our word ‘apathy’], because he is not vulnerable to them. But the bad man is called ‘passionless’ in a different sense, which means the same as ‘hard-hearted’ and ‘insensitive’. (Lives, 7.117)

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Zeno meant that the wise man was not enslaved by his feelings of fear or desire, but we’re explicitly told here that’s not the same as being ‘hard-hearted’ and ‘insensitive’, which is the false impression many people have today of Stoicism. The Roman Stoic Laelius was portrayed, centuries later in a dialogue by Cicero, as saying that it would actually be the greatest possible mistake to try to eliminate natural and healthy feelings such as those of friendship, because even animals experience affection for their offspring, which Stoics viewed as the foundation of human love and friendship (Laelius, On Friendship, 13).

We would not only be dehumanizing ourselves by eliminating such natural feelings, he says, but reducing ourselves below animal nature to something more like a mere tree trunk or a stone. We should therefore turn a deaf ear to anyone who foolishly suggests that the good life entails having ‘the hardness of iron’ in terms of our emotions. Epictetus subsequently taught his students that we ought not to be free from passions (apathi) in the sense of being unfeeling ‘like a statue’, because Stoics do care about their family and fellow citizens, for whom they continue to have ‘natural affection’ and a sense of kinship or ‘affinity’. Finally, Seneca, likewise, says:

There are misfortunes which strike the sage – without incapacitating him, of course – such as physical pain, infirmity, the loss of friends or children, or the catastrophes of his country when it is devastated by war. I grant that he is sensitive to these things, for we do not impute to him to be hardness of a rock or of iron. There is no virtue in putting up with that which one does not feel. (On the Constancy the Sage, 10.4)

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Diogenes

There’s a strange problem, as Seneca points out here, with the notion that the Stoic Sage is completely devoid of emotion. It recalls a story about Diogenes the Cynic, who was asked by a Spartan if he was feeling cold, when training himself by stripping naked and embracing a bronze statue in winter. Diogenes said he was not, and the Spartan replied: ‘What’s so impressive about what you’re doing then?’.

As Seneca implies, the Stoic of ‘courage’ and ‘self-discipline’ appear to presuppose that the Sage actually experiences something akin to fear and desire – otherwise he has no feelings to overcome. A brave man isn’t someone who doesn’t experience any trace of fear whatsoever but someone who acts courageously despite feeling anxiety. A man who has great self discipline or restraint isn’t someone who feels no inkling of desire but someone who overcomes his cravings, by abstaining from acting upon them.

The Sage conquers his passions by stronger than them not by eliminating all traces of emotion from his life. The Stoic ideal is therefore not to be ‘passionless’ in the sense of being apathenc, ‘hard-hearted’, ‘insensitive’ or ‘like a statue’ of stone iron. Rather, it is to experience natural affection for ourselves, our loved ones, and other human , and to value our lives in accord with nature, which arguably opens us up to experiencing certain natural emotional reactions to loss or frustration.

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The Stoics call these ‘proto passions’ and the Sage does feel these emerging emotions but does not go along with them, or dwell on them, as people ordinarily do. Hence, Seneca elsewhere explains that whereas the Epicureans mean ‘a mind immune to feeling’ when they speak of apatheia, this ‘unfeelingness’ is actually the opposite of what the Stoics mean. ‘This is the difference between us Stoics and the Epicureans; our wise man overcomes every discomfort but feels it, theirs does not even feel it’ (Letters, 9). The virtue of the Sage consists in his ability to endure painful feelings and rise above them, while continuing to maintain his relationships and interaction with the world, to care sufficiently about ourselves and others but not enough to anxiously worry.

In fact, the earliest Stoic writings defined the ‘passions’ they sought to overcome as consisting of irrational, excessive and unhealthy forms of fear and desire. They are said to be ‘unnatural’ in the sense of harming our natural pursuit of fulfilment in life. It’s somewhat less well-known that these were contrasted with a range of ‘healthy passions’ (eupatheiai) which although not pursued directly by the Stoics were thought to ‘supervene’ as a kind of additional reward following virtuous living.

Marcus Aurelius

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As several of the leading academic scholars of Stoicism have emphasized. ‘The inclusion of ‘good feelings’ in the Stoics’ mental repertoire shows that their philosophy did not countenance extirpation of all emotions’ (Long, 2002, p. 245). Indeed, healthy feelings such as love and ‘natural affection’ towards others play an important but often overlooked role in Stoicism. When described the Stoic ideal as being ‘free from passions and yet full of love’, he clearly meant that the ‘passions’ in question are bad or unhealthy feelings, to be distinguished from what Stoics call ‘natural affection’ or rational love for others.

The problem of the passions inevitably meant that a kind of ancient psychological therapy was integral to Stoicism as a way of life. Indeed, the topic of eudaimonia naturally links Stoic to psychological therapy. Most ancient philosophies equated the ‘good’ in life with what is ‘good for us’, ‘beneficial’ or ‘helpful’ (ophelimos), in the sense of contributing to our fundamental health and wellbeing, not physically but mentally and morally, in terms of our character. You could therefore say that ‘self-help’ was an integral aspect of Stoic Ethics, and this not only resembles modern therapy but was quite explicitly presented as a form of medicine or therapy for the mind by ancient authors.

The Stoics therefore, more than any other school, focused on philosophy as a way of life, and specific ways of training themselves to overcome their unhealthy passions and progress towards the lofty ideal of virtue. Some people have argued that Stoicism is purely a philosophy, with an ethical emphasis, and should not be confused with a psychological therapy. However, these two things were seen as equivalent by Zeno and his followers. Stoicism therefore neatly combines ethics, self-improvement and psychological therapy.”

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